On October 23, Apple posted a commercial for the recently announced 13-inch MacBook Pro—it feels like that the company has pulled old man out of its MacBook line. The sleek 13-inch latest ‘MacBook Pro’ could be a potent rival for slim ultrabooks. The 13-inch Apple’s device is available at the starting price tag of $1,699; Although it’s costlier than Apple’s other 13-inch Macbook Pro lineups, but it offers better features and specifications.

At the time, when the sales of PC are continuously declining and manufacturers are struggling to create even minimal profit margin, while other side, Apple is leveraging over its brand value and endeavoring to create greater profit margins on its MacBook Pro lineups.

Apparently, number of notebook vendors are now focusing to build high-resolution screen due to increasing demands of high-resolution on devices day-over-day. Apple is one of the pioneer players launched ‘Retina Display third generation iPad this spring. As more pixels have been pushed to screen panel of the new device, there’s a need of additional graphics processing for the proper functioning of the device. Besides, it’s also required to rewrite software in order to make it compatible with high-resolution screen. Apple has to privilege developers to build ‘retina display’ apps for ‘App store ecosystem’.

On Tuesday this week, Apple also announced 5 mm thick ‘Retina Display’ iMac desktops with a resolution of 2,560×1,440 pixels on the 27-inch model and 1,920×1,080 pixels for the 21.5-inch version. The latest iMac is outstanding and it has raised marketers expectations.

The Retina Display MacBook Pros Could Leverage On Increasing Demand of iMacs

According to a recent prediction, Apple’s newly introduced iMac (announced on October 23) is expected to boost desktop shipments in Q4 this year (Calendar). It’s expected that Apple may have shipped 264,000 units of desktop in Q4 (fiscal 2012) ended September 2012, down 79% compare to the same quarter of the last year.

In Q1 of fiscal 2013, Apple is estimated to show 434% quarter-over quarter growth in shipments. By the end of this year, iMac shipments will hit 1.4 million figure, demonstrating 5% decline compare to a year ago. Although, overall Mac desktops’ shipments will hit 3.8 million units mark in Q4, but total shipments will decline by 21% Y/Y.

As the demands of iMac are expected to mount up, it could favor the shipments of new launched retina display Macbook Pros. However, the starting price of Apple’s new 13-inch device is quite higher than the basic price PC notebook— starting from $600 to $800.

How New MacBook Pros Are Better Than Predecessors?

At present, Apple is incredibly trying to differentiate its growing products lineups. With addition of the 13-inch ‘Retina Display MacBook Pro’, there are now eight different MacBook Pro models are available in Apple’s Online Store and users have now more options to opt the device as per their choice.

The new 13-inch Retina Display MacBook Pro is 25% thinner than its previous version and it features ‘solid state flash’–that will accelerate booting by 2.4x and file copying by 3.7x. Besides, the battery in device is capable to provide 7 hrs of use and 30 days standby.

In addition to these, the new Retina Display MacBook Pros (13-inch and 15- inch) sport revamped audio systems, dual mics ( designed for the noise reduction) and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M graphics Processor with 1 GB of video memory—up to 60% faster graphics performance than previous generation Macs. The new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro went on sale on Tuesday after its debut; The device with the base 2.5 GHz dual Intel core i5 version is avaiable at the starting price of $1699 .

Anyway, the new device has been designed to contend Ultrabooks in the markets. Although the device is costlier than its previous 13-inch MacBook Pro lineups, but it’s better in functionality and could entice significant number of users around.